We just finished our addition/subtraction chapter which included column addition, adding 4 digit number, and carrying. Subtraction was with regrouping, and across zeroes. I have quite a few kids that are very slow with basic addition/subtraction facts. I don't feel like I can take the time in class to drill these, and I'm going to put that responsibility on the parents.

Multiplication starts next week, so I guess I'll start there tomorrow. Can't wait to see how my students do with it. We'll hopefully be doing SuperSpeed M-Th and then a timed independent drill on Friday, because at my school we have to do weekly drills and record results to see if they are making gains over time.

I have printed all of the copies of the levels and slipped them into page protectors. Planning to drop a transparency marker into each page so they'll always have it. This will go inside the math section of their 3 ring binders and we'll just start math with this each day.

Nikki
That is real similar to what I have been doing. Sometimes I let them use the marker and write the answers down right on the sheet protector, instead of just using it to mark their neighbors wrong answers.

Today we had an all 4th grade competition over 100 multiplication facts in 5 minutes. I had 21 out of 32 kids get 95% or better. My goal of course is 32 out of 32 at 100%, but even the kids who came in low, got better due to SuperSpeed math. It works, they just need to keep practicing.

Giving it to the parents is a great idea!

Power to the Teacher!!

Chris

Thanks Chris! Can I ask you what you think an appropriate number of problems to answer in a 5 minute time span would be? You said over 100 problems, how many is that?

Also, for your timed drills, do you use just a blank of the superspeed, or do you pull from other sources for mixed facts as well so that they aren't accustomed to seeing it the same way? I was going to pull from other sources to do my timed drills.

Last year, our "school goal" was to be able to answer 100 facts in 6 minutes with 95% accuracy. Yesterday I did 122 X facts in 7 minutes, and a handful passed with 95 or higher, however it was only our first time.

In the past, we've also went through one fact at a time, for example timed drill on 6s, then when they passed that they moved on to 7s, then 8s, etc... I hated this because I had a full class with kids on all different things and it was a pain to keep up with and manage. I like using superspeed because it throws everything together, and I'm doing my timed drills that way. My logic to explain this is that we don't teach the ABCs in sequential, why should we have to teach/learn X facts in order?

Sorry Nikki...I meant over the 100 problems, not more than 100. 100 is nice because it makes the percentage easy to figure.

I practice with both the SuperSpeed, but we have another that we use from a workbook to test the kids on. Variety is good. Our goal is to get the 100 down to 3 minutes, but that would be all operations together. Any variety is good practice.